Researchers Find Rare Giant Worm Doesn’t Live Up to Its Billing
By JIM ROBBINS, April 27, 2010, NY Times [here]
HELENA, Mont.— Once feared extinct, the giant Palouse earthworm, reputed to grow up to three feet long and smell like lilies, has been found alive.
It turns out though, experts say, the worm is not a giant, nor does it have a lilylike scent.
Researchers thought the translucent worm with the pink head, last seen in the 1980s, might be extinct because its habitat, the Palouse prairie region of Idaho and Washington, is almost gone. On March 27, however, Karl Umiker, a University of Idaho research support scientist, working with Shan Xu, a graduate student from Chengdu, China, discovered two giant Palouse earthworms, a juvenile and an adult, on a small patch of native prairie near Moscow, Idaho.
As it turns out, the worms are bigger than night crawlers but not giant. The two specimens, the adult of which had to be killed and dissected to determine it was indeed a giant Palouse earthworm, were about seven inches long when they came from the ground.
“But when we stretched it out and relaxed it, the adult earthworm got bigger,” said Jodi Johnson-Maynard an associate professor of soil and water management and Mr. Umiker’s supervisor. “It’s between nine and 10 inches.”
She admits that’s a far cry from earlier claims of three-foot worms. “We tried to track that story down,” Ms. Johnson-Maynard said, and discovered that many years ago there was one giant specimen. “Apparently some boy was swinging it in the air like a rope and it stretched.” … [more]